The Adventure of the drugged up detective
by bluehairdontcare
Summary: After John discovers Sherlock high in a crack house he suggests he goes to rehab to which Sherlock strangely agrees. Sherlock's suspicious cooperation makes John wonder whether his friend is finally accepting his weakness or if something else entirely is going on.
1. Chapter 1

**a/n: Some allusions to HLV (early on) - I didn't bother writing the scene where John finds Sherlock in a crack house because His Last Vow does that perfectly, i basically just carry on from the point where they get back to Baker St. The case was inspired by The Adventure of the dying detective (ACD) and there are some other ACD canon references etc. weee ok so lets get going, hope you like it and if you don't tell me why :)**

******Warnings: Explanation of how to prepare drugs etc what you'd expect from a drug story really...**

* * *

Sherlock slumped up the stairs of 221b Baker Street in his filthy track bottoms, which clung to the unmistakable (for anyone who knows it) stench of 'crack house'. Sherlock identified this smell as a foul combination of burnt chemicals, mold and human odor. He flopped towards his chair beside the fireplace and curled himself into an awkward ball placing his face against the armrest as John and Mycroft talked incessantly and rummaged around the flat looking for his stash. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the pleasant feeling of the very last of the chemicals running through his veins entertain his neurons.

Speedballs had proven to be highly efficient – the co-administration of cocaine and heroin provided the rush of euphoria and intense stimulation of the neurons without the unpleasantness of anxiety from the cocaine or drowsiness from the heroin. Sherlock found this combination incredibly chemically satisfying – it was a pleasing balance of simultaneous stimulation. One drug triggered the sympathetic nervous system and the other the parasympathetic nervous system, which put his mind into an astonishing state of high activity. Someone more prone to description would tell you that at first its like a gasp of euphoric breath that fills you with divine lightness, shooting you to the heavens as though you're attached to a nuclear powered rocket, which is then followed by a slow, warm descent from the clouds like feather in the breeze and then right before you hit the ground you accelerate to over 9000 miles per hour before smashing face first into a concrete floor. While you feel like a combination of James Bond and Jesus driving around Monaco in a sports car full of naked women in reality you look like someone who has been shot in the stomach, died and then walked around as a zombie for a couple of hours covered in your own vomit.

He also enjoyed the scientific nature of the process of formulation – it was exactly like preparing an experiment. The careful calculation of ratios and amounts to avoid overdose, adding the heroin amount to a spoon, crushing it, adding water, then the tiny drop of citric acid, then the heating, then the adding of the cocaine once slightly cooled, the final moments of the process of dissolving, then drawing the liquid through the corner of an alcohol swab up into the syringe. He flicked his eyes open again to check that John and Mycroft were still there, he hadn't heard them speaking for a while. But their mouths were still flapping angrily which told him he had just zoned out momentarily. Good, he thought, I bet whatever they're saying is utterly drab. He looked around the room with one swoop making a mental inventory. Mrs. Hudson had already conducted another search no doubt, given the state of his desk papers and the placement of his slippers, she probably had no idea what she had been searching for in all probability.

"You won't find anything," He muttered flatly.

"Oh yes and why do I doubt that?" Mycroft replied, "I do recall you had something of a habit of keeping your supplies at arms reach did you not? I remember the Moroccan leather case you kept your…. _Instruments_ in"

John looked between Sherlock and Mycroft uncertainly; it was becoming more and more apparent to him how little he knew of Sherlock's life before him. Sherlock watched John's pinched expression as he rummaged through the kitchen, it was clear that he was distressed by the fact that he had failed to stop him from using again but Sherlock thought this bit of emotion on John's part was largely illogical considering his drug use was, against the highest probability, unstoppable.

"You are celebrity these days Sherlock you can't afford a drug habit"

"I do not have a drug habit," Sherlock barked, attempting to find the normal razor sharpness of his tone but failing.

Mycroft smiled glibly and turned toward John with a questioning expression.

"I can't find anything" John replied.

"See, I told you" Sherlock growled as he shifted himself slightly, he looked unusual. His ordinarily astute face was strangely mask like; his pupils had disintegrated into tiny little pinpricks below the glassiness of the surface, his red lids were opening and shutting lazily as though he was struggling to stay awake and his normally milky skin was pinpricked by tiny red flecks like subatomic bruises. John had never seen him look so filthy or dressed so casually for that matter; Sherlock usually upheld a catlike standard of personal cleanliness, which included the almost obsessive tidiness of his normal attire but now he was practically unrecognizable in an oversized hoodie and ripped track pants.

"I had to call mummy and daddy, Sherlock" Mycroft said almost threateningly,

"Oh for god sake Mycroft!"

"They would have come but I assured them I had it under control this time… not that them being around makes much of a difference to your abstinence anyhow".

Sherlock cackled insouciantly in reply and John wondered what the story there was.

Mycroft loitered around the room in his slow sweeping gait towards the kitchen where John was standing unsure of what to do or say next. Mycroft slowly turned himself to face John and raised his eyebrows decisively, flicking his eyes towards the chairs as if to tell him to sit down.

"Oh right" John mumbled. He pulled two chairs around to the place where his old chair used to be, facing Sherlock. He still didn't understand why Sherlock had moved his chair. It seemed mildly insulting.

As Mycroft and John sat down Sherlock heaved out a bored sigh, "You're not going to have some sort of ridiculous intervention now are you? It has never worked before"

"Yes well we never had John Watson before" Mycroft leered.

John took his cue. Although he knew about Sherlock's drug use and was often coopted by Mycroft to watch for potential relapses (indicated by increased cigarette consumption), he had never really had a conversation with Sherlock about it and now it was beginning to nag it him. Sherlock smiled as he noticed that distinct twitch of John's mouth and cheek that indicated such.

"I want to know everything – I think that me knowing a little bit more about your drug use will be helpful… for both me and you, Sherlock. But I want to hear it from _your own mouth_" He said purposefully aiming his words towards Mycroft, who looked away innocently rolling his eyes.

Sherlock cleared his throat quietly. _God _these drugs made his mouth dry, and his eyes were so itchy, and his arm was sore and why was John looking at him like that.

"Sherlock?" John said firmly.

"Hmm? Yes. Oh right the question. Uh I have been known to partake in the intravenous use of opiates and cocaine on occasion" he said with a vague wave of the hand. John let out a perturbed sigh as he rubbed his hand across his brow.

"On _occasion!"_ Mycroft laughed coldly, "You and I both know that is far too light an explanation considering it gives the impression that you are _not_ an addict… _Habitual_ would be much more precise wouldn't you agree? Even despite your periods of abstinence"

Sherlock shot Mycroft a pained look of sarcastic indifference.

"Yes well my drug use does tend to rise and fall in its intensity, sometimes laying dormant for interludes and then coming back with ferocity during periods of boredom"

"Periods of boredom?" John spat.

"Yes John, my mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere, I can dispense then with artificial stimulants but otherwise…. " Sherlock trailed off lazily. _Otherwise_ he continued in thought, _Otherwise _his brain would begin to overload like a pinball machine full of thousands of little metal balls all bouncing and colliding frenziedly with the walls of his brain, all moving so fast and loud that to recognize an individual thought is almost impossible, shouting but not able to hear, like a nightmare of nonsense, a cacophony of the senses. This was the way his brain had always been and as such he had learned how to both embrace it and counteract it.

When you look at a man like Sherlock Holmes it is hard to imagine him as a child, you start to paint pictures of some young genius, able to shut down every adult who tries to out smart him but in fact that is just a matter of placing modern perspective onto an event in history. Realistically Sherlock was a lonely, awkward child who learned very slowly over many years how to protect himself from emotion. The way you see him now is simply the end result of someone who learnt to cope with his own strange personality. He began to obsess over anything that could hold his attention and was able to build his considerable genius after many years and found that it was this fact alone that could redeem his otherwise unusual character. Maybe we could all be geniuses if we totally avoided every aspect of our lives except for our studies. At university he was unsociable and preferred moping in his rooms working out his own little methods of thought so that he never mixed much with the men of his year. In fact he only first developed his methods of deduction while an undergraduate and his earliest cases came from fellow university students. But his interest in chemistry is what is truly pertinent here.

"As you know John, I have a fastidious interest in chemistry, and as such I found myself _particularly_ interested in my ability to change my brain function using chemicals" He grinned, "It became apparent to me that I could literally out smart my own brain"

John sat perched on the end of his chair with his elbows on his knees, Sherlock noted that he had a small tremor in his hand indicating that his nightmares were back, a notion which was sustained by the blackness of John's eyes.

"As a doctor I would have to say that this all sounds an awful lot like self medicating… I mean I think we all know that you are not necessarily…."

"Sane?" Sherlock interjected almost mockingly, "yes well I think that is a very established fact"

"When did this start?" John continued to probe.

"Oh for god sake, would you quit your needless worrying, this is all for a case!" Sherlock said throwing up his hands childishly.

"Yes you keep saying that but _what _case?" John growled.

"I can't tell you that John, it would ruin it" Sherlock replied flatly.

"See, _I _think that's a lie… I think you are using that as a bullshit justification for using again"

"I AM PERFECTLY FINE!" Sherlock yelled jumping from the chair as quickly as he possibly could in his slightly slowed down state.

"Yes that's what you said last time Sherlock" Mycroft muttered.

"What happened last time?" John asked.

Last time was the reason Sherlock had been clean for years. It was literally the last time he had taken drugs… until now. He had spent most of his adult life engaged in his education, which suited him fine as it meant he could divorce himself from everything and just focus on his experiments. His drug use had started at university and at first involved a very thorough study of the effects of almost every drug possible. But as his hypothesis had suggested it was cocaine and opiates that suited him best.

Cocaine : **C**17**H**21**NO**4

Cocaine was interesting. Cocaine was the perfect stimulant.

Opiates came slightly later when he realized that they were the perfect antidotes to emotion – he was able to just float away from everything human with a simple push of the needle. It was a perfectly scientific reaction to humanity.

Sherlock used the fact that he was able to finish his PhD and also take numerous consulting cases all the while using recreational drugs as proof that he was in total control of the substances. But when he graduated from university he was suddenly thrust out into a terribly boring world. He tried to take as many consulting cases as possible but generally private clients were just so incredibly tedious, my husbands cheating, _yes he is_, my wife is cheating,_ yes she is. _

_No, fuck_ _this I need drugs_. _More _drugs. Drugs are a rational response to madness some say, and ration is what he prized above all else.

"Sherlock it doesn't matter whether you claim to be able to control your use or whatever, the fact that you fall back into using class A drugs in order to cope with life _still_ makes you a drug addict" John spoke firmly, he wished he could scream but as a doctor he knew a calm, informative tone was the best to avoid spooking him.

"Pfft! Cope with life? I cope just fine!"

Sherlock felt insulted. _Can't cope with life._ What a terribly boring way to think about drug use.

Sherlock pushed himself out of the chair again and stumbled towards the bathroom with an irritated flap of his hands.

"There better not be drugs in the fucking loo Sherlock!" John shouted pointlessly after him.

Mycroft turned towards John in that smooth, considered way of his and said simply, "What do you suggest?"

John frowned at him, "Well in a normal circumstance I would suggest we sent him to a rehab clinic but…"

"Institutionalization has never worked in the past I'm afraid… much to my parents disappointment" Mycroft crooned.

"Yeah that's what I would have thought" John sighed and considered for a moment, "honestly I don't know what else to suggest apart from rehab."

"OK" came Sherlock's voice from the corridor behind them.

John spun around shocked, "Ok?... what the hell does ok mean?"

"It's a term of agreement, probably derived from the mid 19th century abbreviation of _Orl Korrect, _an apparently humorous form of _all correct_"

"Yeah ok smart arse but what do you mean you _agree_?" John muttered rolling his eyes.

"I'll go to rehab," Sherlock said simply.

John's mouth began to creep open as his face scrunched and squinted, "Wait what?"

"Fine I'll book you in at –" Mycroft began.

"No, no, no, wait _what? _Did… did you, _Sherlock Holmes,_ just agree to going to - "

"Yes, yes I did…" Sherlock said casually almost ignoring John's apparent shock, "But I will not be going to some ridiculous posh clinic of your choosing Mycroft"

"Alright so where do you propose?" Mycroft muttered with an increasingly bothered tone.

"Wait no… Am I the only one who thinks this is weird though?" John said

"I think Dr. Smith at Hope House" Sherlock nodded ignoring John's agape expression.

"_Hope_ house? Seriously this has got to be some kind of joke right? You're bullshitting aren't you" John half-laughed. Seriously though in what world would Sherlock Holmes ever voluntarily go somewhere named _Hope_ house?

Although the depressingly upbeat name of the clinic did irk him to his very core it was unfortunately where Dr. Smith worked and that meant it was indeed the place he needed to be.

"Why doctor Smith?" Mycroft urged, "He is so irrelevant that I haven't even heard of him!"

Sherlock just smiled. An unnerving smile amidst what would normally be a harrowing and emotional decision. John's eyebrows rose so far up his forehead they practically met with his hairline – he wondered if Sherlock's weirdness was due to him still being slightly high or if there was something else going on.

"I'll go pack my bags then" he grinned before shuffling out of the room.

_"What?!" _John murmured in disbelief, "what the hell was that?"


	2. Chapter 2

The taxi ride to the clinic was one of unexpected calmness. John kept absent-mindedly shaking his head at the lack of attitude from Sherlock, he was expecting there to be much more repulsed sniping and flat out refusal. But Mycroft had assured him that unpredictability in Sherlock's mood was quite the norm when he was using. He could become weirdly malleable and lucid for a tiny window of time as though he was thinking about something entirely removed from what was going on but this was quite quickly and irreversibly followed by annoyance, anger and even violence when he resurfaced from whatever cavern of his brain the drugs could send him to. Mycroft told him that there had been more than one occasion when Sherlock had pinned him against a wall or shoved him into doorframes. As such, Mycroft didn't care to overthink Sherlock's behavior in these situations.  
"You take him John" Mycroft had commanded, "make sure he actually goes inside" he said with a wry smirk as though he very much expected that Sherlock's acquiescence would not last very long. John wouldn't be surprised if Mycroft was ready to send a team of heavies to force Sherlock into rehab when John no doubt rang to say Sherlock had changed his mind or escaped. But for now he just let John deal with the menace.

"You ok?" he asked, but Sherlock didn't answer. He kind of wished he could answer but now was not the time. The taxi was making him feel claustrophobic and ill.  
"Come down" Sherlock muttered, he thought perhaps he should add something about wanting another hit to allow John the opportunity to say something affirming as he knew he wanted to, "maybe this is a bad idea… drop me at Camden," he said.  
"Camden, what? Why?" John chuckled uncomfortably as he tried to discern Sherlock's level of seriousness. He frowned and continued assuredly, "No come on Sherlock you're doing a good thing,"  
Sherlock smiled feeling slightly satisfied, there, now John must feel much better.

"Why this clinic in particular?" John asked after a moment of silence.  
"Doctor Culverton Smith" Sherlock replied quietly. Actually maybe he really did want to get out at his dealers house in Camden. Even though he almost never had direct contact with the wretched person and usually just employed one of his homeless network to pick up. He had just reached the smashing your head into the pavement at 9000 mph part of the speedball and he felt like his brain was going to drip out of his eyes.  
"Yes ok so what about Culverton Smith is so important?"  
Sherlock didn't reply, he just shut his eyes and let out a long pained breathe.  
"How bad's the come down?" John asked.  
"Oh for god's sake please discontinue your muttering John it makes for quite a terrible atmosphere in here"  
"What? Inside the taxi?"  
"No inside my brain" Sherlock grimaced as though that was the most obvious thing ever. The taxi turned down a street, which ran between a large hospital and a row of houses.

Hope House.  
Yes that was indeed a very depressingly upbeat name for the place.  
The building looked like every other in the street, that particular brand of London terraced housing that changes ever so slightly area by area depending on the regions wealth. This was the more plebian type; Sherlock thought acerbically, it was one of the exposed brick kinds of terrace not the full white nicer kind that you found in areas like Chelsea. The areas of the façade that did have paint (just the Victorian decoration around the doors and windows mainly) were flaking woefully and the pitiful garden out the front had been so badly tended to that it was nothing more than a dirt path with a single weed-like tree sticking out of it. There was someone waiting at the bottom of the short set of steps that lead up to the front door. Female, 30's, overcompensates for feeling inadequate as a female by being horrendously strict, possible gambling addict ironically, with a penchant for younger men Sherlock thought as he watched her standing in what was essentially a nurses uniform (all though it wasn't meant to look too much like one).

"You ready?" John asked. Sherlock tried to give him an assured smile but the crunching feeling the movement of his face elicited made it seem half hearted. I guess, it was really though. Just as Sherlock was set to get out of the car someone else appeared from inside the house, a tall, silver haired man who gave off the particular air of a doctor. John assumed it was Smith. As Sherlock locked his focus on the man a peculiar wave of defiance seemed to come rushing over him.  
"NO! No, I am leaving John, this is a terrible, terrible idea, I will not be left with these people, take me to Camden or I will JUMP OFF A BUILDING... again" he began to shout as though to make the man hear.  
"What?" John was shocked at the sudden outburst but remembered what Mycroft had told him about how dramatically Sherlock's moods could swing. But why it seemed so pointed towards the now gathering staff members, (Another man had come outside as the sound of the comm otion) was another question. Sherlock was now gripping the seat as John tried to push him from the car.  
"NO! FUCK YOU ALL! I AM NOT DOING THIS!" he shouted. John had never heard him swear like that actually, he thought. It was almost as though he had reverted to being a trouble teenager.

"Mr. Scott" The officious nurse lady stated, "This kind of behavior will not help you"  
John went to correct her on his name but realized he had probably given her a false name in order to keep a low profile. Plus he wasn't acting like Sherlock Holmes right now anyway; he may as well have been Mr. Scott.  
"My name is Nurse Morton, welcome to Hope House…." she said firmly over Sherlock's incoherent shouting.  
The man who John now assumed to be some sort of orderly grabbed Sherlock by the underarms and dragged him to a standing position before pinning his arms by wrapping them tightly around him. Sherlock began kicking out with his long, spider-like legs.  
"Sherlock, would you please calm down!" John shouted.  
"No let me go, you savages!" Sherlock screamed.  
"Jesus Sherlock" John muttered as he stood helplessly clutching Sherlock's bag,  
"I've changed my mind, there is nothing wrong with me" Sherlock was growling now, "there is nothing wrong with me, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH ME!" he screamed. John stepped forward and gripped his arm despite Sherlock's struggling.  
"Just go inside, it'll be fine… I'll see you soon" John said trying desperately to be reassuring.  
Then, very strangely Sherlock started to smile and cackle manically, "Yes, very soon" he said with a glint of the eye that made John recoil once again with a sense of being left out on some piece of important information. The mood shift was so terrifyingly blatant, he seemed like a balloon tied to a rollercoaster. The orderly kept a tight hold of Sherlock and he helped him towards the front door as Sherlock squirmed as much as possible. As he passed Doctor Smith on the stairs, he gave him such a steely glare that John feared for Smith's own sanity in the near future.

John climbed back into the taxi and watched Sherlock enter the house as the driver pulled away. He had looked so utterly dreadful sitting there in the back seat, crushing his eyes shut in a pained expression John assumed was the result of a painful headache. The sweating and jittering would probably come next, but John wouldn't be there to see it. Seeing the normally guarded Sherlock look so (frankly) insane and exposed made up for any feelings of suspicion or reservation John had about the weirdly extreme shift of his temperament from strangely agreeable to preposterously difficult. It's just the drugs, he thought.  
His phone was ringing.  
"Mycroft?" John answered.  
"Any trouble?" Mycroft's voice said almost mockingly  
"Yeah, you were right about the compliance not sticking – the second we got there he just flipped"  
"But he went inside did he? Or do I have to send someone out to find him and admit him forcibly?" Mycroft said calmly as though this had happened before.  
"No, no he's inside… for now anyway"

Sherlock startled slightly as the front door slammed shut behind him. Too fucking loud. He wished he hadn't agreed to this. Why the hell did this seem like a good idea in the first place? He could feel the beginnings of the dreaded fatigue blurring out the edges and he cursed himself for the physically taxing performance he gave outside the house. But Mycroft and John were both so expecting him to be difficult and it would have been suspicous to refuse them their worry.

The first room was very much like a hospital waiting room but a little more secure looking. There was a door locked by electric key pass that lead to the back section of the house, which proved to be much larger (possibly a couple of the houses combined) than it looked from the outside, a flexiglass wall separated the waiting room from the rest of the house – it ran from the locked door right down to the nurses station/check in desk on the right, which could be accessed from both sides. Sherlock was taken in through the locked door. He made a mental note of where the keys were kept. And then taken into a small office room where he was forced to change into 'loose fitting active wear' (oh god, vom) after a frankly invading, bordering on violating search and then waited to be interviewed with the burly ever-present orderly hovering nearby.

"Fill this in" Nurse Morton said flatly as she thrust a clipboard with a set of comprehensive forms on top in his direction. Sherlock flatly whipped the board out of her hand with a swooping chop so that the papers landed in a disorganized pile on the floor.  
"A lot of our patients are quite disagreeable at first Mr. Scott, don't worry we're quite used to it" Dr. Smith interjected as he moved into the office room. He would need to be much more disagreeable then Sherlock thought.  
"Ah Doctor Smith" he crooned, "What a pleasure"  
"You know of me?" Smith asked as he sat down at the seat behind the desk.  
The man had the bird like twitchy eyes of someone who was quite desperate to be successful but so far had been halted in a stubborn state of mediocrity.  
"Yes indeed" Sherlock continued, "You have some very unusual views on addiction treatment, am I correct?"  
"Well as long as you don't mean unusual in the bad sense," the doctor laughed lightly.  
"You were pro-lobotomy in your early career were you not?" Sherlock probed, a wicked smile crept onto his tired face as he watched the doctor twitch nervously, all the hopefulness and ease rushing from his eyes leaving them empty and black, Sherlock loved when he could get people to look like that, "and also a PhD chemistry student, specializing in pharmacology, in addition to your psychiatric degree, with a special interest in medication specifically for curing addiction. But you couldn't get any support for your drug trials or experiments now could you? Too many adverse reactions?" Sherlock spat out bitingly, almost smug.  
"How the hell do you know that?" the doctor asked uneasily.  
"Isn't it obvious" Sherlock smiled glibly.  
But much to Sherlock's chagrin the doctor didn't encourage an elaboration of his deduction. He just nodded and began filling in some forms as he grinded his perfectly aligned teeth. How drab.  
"What drugs have you been using Mr Scott?"  
"Herion, Morphine, Cocaine"  
"All intravenous?"  
"Yes"  
"How long have you been using?"  
"On and off since university… but I am not a drug addict Doctor, I want to make that clear, I am simply here to prove a point"  
"And what might that point be?"  
"That i'm not a drug addict"


	3. Chapter 3

"Ahh Methadone" Sherlock muttered. He was really regretting this now.  
"Don't worry, I will talk to you about more prescriptions later on" the doctor replied blandly, "first we will start with Methadone and will titrate you from this dosage back down to nothing"  
After the doctor took Sherlock's medical history and gave him his first daily dose, Nurse Morton showed him to his room, which was a small rectangle of absolute clinical inhospitality that spoke of lack of funding and a sort of junkie ghostliness.  
"How dreary" he muttered.  
"Yes well this isn't the Ritz" Nurse Morton replied, "come on I will show you to the common room now"  
"Oh joy"  
Inside the common room Sherlock scanned his eyes across the bare, white space, which was dotted with thin, sallow looking junkies at varying stages of withdrawal. Clearly the newest resident aside from himself, was a red haired girl sitting on a chair beside the window who was rocking back and forth, green faced and sweaty. Sherlock sat down on a solitary chair in the corner of the room as far from her as possible and scanned the motley crew. Before he could even begin his deductions, a man with long thin limbs and huge owl like eyes came screaming into the room followed by Doctor Smith.  
"IF YOU LOT ARE SO FUCKIN' GREAT WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP KILLIN' THEMSELVES IN 'ERE?" He shouted. Nurses and orderlies were beginning to crowd around the man.  
"Oh no you fucking don't!" he warned as they moved closer "You pieces o'shit, you can't help us, get away from me! All you do is make people wanna kill themselves!" an orderly lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm.  
"I'm checking out right now I don't care if it's against your recommendation!" the man shouted.

"Pretty normal in a place like this" muttered a voice. Sherlock turned to see an older woman had taken up a seat on the table next to his chair. She had that unmistakable look of a long time junkie, her face was wrinkled like cling-wrap that had been stretched around a skull, her skin was almost green with sallowness and her eyes sunken back into the sockets. She was that kind of old junkie that when you see them in the street there is just no mistaking them for one.  
"Is it?" Sherlock asked dully.  
"Oooh yes, I first came 'ere 10 years ago when Doctor Smith opened the place and you know the first few times I came in things were alright you know, no suicides but this time I came in there've been 8 or so suicides in only a couple months" her small black eyes were stretched as far as they could open at the thought, "shame really…. doesn't do much good for morale though does it"  
"No not particularly" Sherlock turned his focus away from the woman's zombie like face. He noticed his muscles were beginning to twitch and sweat was pushing its way through his skin. But the worst part was the assault on his usual sharpness that the inevitable crash cut of dopamine and serotonin was creating. The edges of his mind were blurring and he was starting to feel this scratching anger and the niggling gloominess.

In another room Doctor Smith had congregated his staff members for a case meeting.  
"Well as we all know, John Waldman has decided to check out – I don't believe that he is any where near ready to do so but he has completed the medical detox and I will make suggestions for further outpatient rehab if he'll accept that"  
"Doubt it" A psychologist by the name of Rebecca Freeman interjected. She had a kind face but exhausted eyes that expressed hatred towards her job.  
Smith ignored her comment and opened the large file open in front of him. Mycroft had supplied him with the renamed version of Sherlock's file, "Ok so moving on to William Scott… he has been using intravenous heroin and cocaine on and off for a number of years starting at college, previous attempts at getting clean have been made but generally it seems that his difficulty accepting his drug addiction is the main reason he is unable to stay clean. He claims that he is able to 'control' his use as he says he only uses it when he doesn't have anything to occupy his mind – he has a genius level IQ, which may or may not have lead to his social and emotional difficulties. As a child he was diagnosed Asperger's but later the diagnosis was thought inaccurate – other clinicians suggested it is likely a Narcissistic personality disorder or perhaps more fittingly, Schizoid personality disorder, in addition to a possible diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Obviously we need to undertake more diagnostic interviews to determine a correct diagnosis because I quite strongly believe that his drug use is self-medication… also we have him on suicide watch as part of the 72 hour hold due to some of the things he threatened when he was entering the facility, so that we are all aware"  
Nurse Morton cleared her throat loudly and muttered, "We have an awful lot of patients on suicide watch"  
Doctor Smith glared at her and then spat out acerbically, "well sometimes its just necessary Jane…" he paused for a moment to regain his feeling of control over the room, he continued, "Mr Scott's brother informed us that just prior to the last time William got clean there was an incident and indicated that any relapses in his drug use are usually due to his mental condition relapsing also"  
"What happened last time?" Nurse Morton asked….

"What happened last time?... Last time Sherlock was using?"  
Mycroft didn't reply but john could hear him breathing as though he was considering, "John… As I have told you before I worry about my brother constantly I think that should be enough for you to infer the seriousness of his behavior – I am afraid I have to go, the Russians are quite an impatient bunch."  
"Wait – Myc – Mycroft… ah fuck it" John mumbled incoherently before hanging up the phone. He was beginning to feel mounting annoyance at the fact that the Holmes brothers (through observation or perhaps background checks on Mycroft's part) probably knew everything there was to know about him and yet he was virtually in the dark about any part of Sherlock's life that he hadn't been witness to. Sherlock's mobile phone was still sitting on the desk beside him where he'd left it. John peered at it, wondering what clues were hidden inside it, if any at all. Maybe he should just scroll through it a bit to see. It's not like Sherlock hasn't done the same thing with his phone right? John picked it up and pressed the on button but unfortunately a lock screen, which he would never be able to crack, quite quickly thwarted his plan. Damn. John made a guilty, surprised noise when the phone began to ring as though it had caught him out in the act of snooping.  
It was Lestrade. Despite the lock screen he was able to answer the call.  
"Hi Greg, it's john"  
"Oh John hi… uh I've got a case for you boys, is Sherlock there?"  
John considered for a moment, he wasn't sure how much Lestrade knew, "Umm he… is… not" John replied awkwardly.  
"Ok, well where is he? When will he be back?"  
"He wont be back for a while… I'm not really sure how long… a couple weeks probably" he was not being very successful at sounding inconspicuous.  
"Oh Jesus, don't tell me he's on the drugs again?" Lestrade replied knowingly to John's surprise.  
"Yeah uh, how'd you know that? He's gone to detox so he should be… ok… I suppose" John stopped suddenly realizing something, "hold on, you don't happen to know what happened last time Sherlock got clean do you? I feel like I'm in the dark and I think I ought to know so that I can help him better when he gets back"  
Lestrade was quiet for a moment, "yeah last time was a big mess unfortunately… actually I'm really surprised you could get him to go to rehab voluntarily this time… When I first met Sherlock he was taking private cases and that sort of thing and one of his cases kind of overlapped into becoming a police matter and he somehow pushed his way into continuing to work the case along side me, I wasn't detective inspector yet at this point of course, that case got me the promotion to DI… I was just so dumbfounded by his genius, I guess… I wanted to keep working with him but - "  
"Right but then you found out he was using drugs"  
"Yeah exactly… I confronted him about it - he kept complaining that everything was too boring. He was pushing so hard to solve my cases but I had to ignore him – I said come back to me when your clean… he overdosed about two days after that, he was very embarrassed about it I think… I'm still not convinced it was accidental"  
John exhaled sadly. He knew that Sherlock was totally able to predict the exact quantity that he could take 'safely' meaning that he either did it on purpose or was so frantic that he missed it. It amazed him how much the thought of Sherlock being less than superhuman hurt him.

"If you don't want to talk about why you relapsed this time around why don't we go back and talk about the time you overdosed a few years ago – how are you feeling about that incident now?"  
Sherlock turned away from the doctor and stared out the window, he could see the hospital across the street and an old man with a clear undiagnosed heart condition walking past it, although he should be going in, Sherlock thought. He was in a small room with one window, two chairs facing each other and a side table with a box of tissues and a clock between them. The box of tissues irritated him; they were ridiculously preemptive and ingenuous.

"Are you going to talk to me about it?" the doctor asked,  
"No shant" Sherlock replied absent minded.

He didn't want to talk about it but he could certainly remember it. It was perhaps the single most embarrassing thing he has ever done – the biggest, most pathetic mistake he'd ever made. Maybe Mycroft was right maybe he was stupid because how could he, the great Sherlock Holmes, the god of reason, become so outright irrational. Drugs, the rational response to madness, he reasoned further. Drugs are rational. In all theory this was correct, as far as it goes. Besides recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin hadn't always been illegal – they had been perfectly legal in the Victorian era – so realistically it wasn't the drugs fault but rather the fact that they came to be over used by too many very stupid people, he reasoned. And furthermore, his own drug use could be blamed on everyone else for being so boring – he remembered the despair of wondering if anything would ever be able hold his interest for longer than a moment, but drugs, oh how interesting, always interesting – the chemical compounds themselves, the purity, the differences in effect according to certain factors, what the effect means in relation to the study of brain function, the neuroscience of drugs, the effects themselves.

But eventually he began to take them too often and too much, they started to blind him like emotion, like love. Which was part of the reason the over dosed embarassed him so much. The natural opioids that are manufactured in the brain (in the hypothalamus) are from a family of neurochemicals known as neuropeptides – also known as the 'molecules of emotion'. They are the reason you feel what you feel when you're angry or excited or in love. But the molecules that were coursing through his blood were not made in his brain but rather some drug factory in Mexico.  
The ventral striatum was also at fault here – the home of motivation, of forward thrust, of desire, the place that causes the theory of 'wanting' and 'liking'. The opiates cause the liking – the sensation of pleasure, and the dopamine causes the 'wanting' – the feeling of desire. Therefore he reasoned it makes evolutionary sense that anything that feels good should become the target of desire. Here in one neat package is the fundamental chemistry of learning – essentially the reward function of the brain. A two edged sword really, as this can also lead to repetition compulsion – learning gone bad. The chemistry and neuroscience of drugs was always interesting. Drugs were rational.

But that wasn't the reason he took them, and he knew it. He took them because the best part of heroin is that it stops you from caring.

He hated the meaning that his brain constantly extrapolated from that. How could he be so pathetic as to become addicted to something that mimicked the molecules of emotion? Why did he need so much to stop caring if he wasn't supposed to care at all? Not caring is what protected him. He refused to accept the emotions which he had always repressed, the harsh feelings that were threatening the core of his identity, the internal dialogue that spoke of condemnations of his self – for being weak, unlikeable, stupid, wrong…. Alone.

Alone is what protected him. Not caring is what protected him.  
Over dosing was embarrassing. It was a big neon, Las Vegas sign flashing boldly to the world, "Sherlock secretly needs people but he doesn't know how to be normal." So heroin would do instead, after all it wasn't it just perfectly 'him' to find a scientific way of avoiding emotion? John didn't need him any more, and he didn't care.

Alone is what destroyed him… trying to not care is what destroyed him.


	4. Chapter 4

"Ahh Methadone" Sherlock muttered. He was _really_ regretting this now.

"Don't worry, I will talk to you about more prescriptions later on" the doctor replied blandly, "first we will start with Methadone and will titrate you from this dosage back down to nothing"

After the doctor took Sherlock's medical history and gave him his first daily dose, Nurse Morton showed him to his room, which was a small rectangle of absolute clinical inhospitality that spoke of lack of funding and a sort of junkie ghostliness.

"How dreary" he muttered.

"Yes well this isn't the Ritz" Nurse Morton replied, "come on I will show you to the common room now"

"Oh joy"

Inside the common room Sherlock scanned his eyes across the bare, white space, which was dotted with thin, sallow looking junkies at varying stages of withdrawal. Clearly the newest resident aside from himself, was a red haired girl sitting on a chair beside the window who was rocking back and forth, green faced and sweaty. Sherlock sat down on a solitary chair in the corner of the room as far from her as possible and scanned the motley crew. Before he could even begin his deductions, a man with long thin limbs and huge owl like eyes came screaming into the room followed by Doctor Smith.

"IF YOU LOT ARE SO FUCKIN' GREAT WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP KILLIN' THEMSELVES IN 'ERE?" He shouted. Nurses and orderlies were beginning to crowd around the man.

"Oh no you fucking don't!" he warned as they moved closer "You pieces o'shit, you can't help us, get away from me! All you do is make people wanna kill themselves!" an orderly lunged forward and grabbed him by the arm.

"I'm checking out right now…. I don't care if it's against your recommendation" the man shouted.

"Pretty normal in a place like this" muttered a voice. Sherlock turned to see an older woman had taken up a seat on the table next to his chair. She had that unmistakable look of a long time junkie; her face was wrinkled like cling-wrap that had been stretched around a skull, almost green with sallowness and her eyes sunken back into the sockets. She was that kind of old junkie that when you see them in the street there is just no mistaking them for one.

"Is it?" Sherlock asked dully.

"Oooh yes, I first came 'ere 10 years ago when Doctor Smith opened the place and you know the first few times I came in things were alright you know, no suicides but this time I came in there've been 8 or so suicides in only a couple months" her small black eyes were stretched as far as they could open at the thought, "shame really…. doesn't do much good for morale though does it"

"No not particularly" Sherlock turned his focus away from the woman's zombie like face. He noticed his muscles were beginning to twitch and sweat was pushing its way through his skin. But the worst part was the assault on his usual sharpness that the inevitable crash cut of dopamine and serotonin was creating. The edges of his mind were blurring and he was starting to feel this scratching anger and the niggling gloominess.

In another room Doctor Smith had congregated his staff members for a case meetings.

"Well as we all know, John Waldman has decided to check out – I don't believe that he is any where near ready to do so but he _has_ completed the medical detox and I will make suggestions for further outpatient rehab if he'll accept that"

"Doubt it" A psychologist by the name of Rebecca Freeman interjected. She had a kind face but exhausted eyes that expressed hatred towards her job.

Smith ignored her comment and opened the large file open in front of him. Mycroft had supplied him with the renamed version of Sherlock's file, "Ok so moving on to William Scott… he has been using intravenous heroin and cocaine on and off for a number of years starting at college, previous attempts at getting clean have been made but generally it seems that his difficulty accepting his drug addiction is the main reason he is unable to _stay_ clean. He claims that he is able to 'control' his use as he says he only uses it when he doesn't have anything to occupy his mind – he has a genius level IQ, which may or may not have lead to his social and emotional difficulties. As a child he was diagnosed Asperger's but later the diagnosis was thought inaccurate – other clinicians suggested it is likely a Narcissistic personality disorder or perhaps more fittingly, Schizoid personality disorder, in addition to a possible diagnosis of bipolar disorder perhaps? Obviously we need to undertake more diagnostic interviews to determine a correct diagnosis because I quite strongly believe that his drug use is self-medication… also we have him on suicide watch as part of the 72 hour hold due to some of the things he threatened when he was entering the facility, so that we are all aware"

Nurse Morton cleared her throat loudly and muttered, "We have an awful lot of patients on suicide watch"

Doctor Smith glared at her and then spat out acerbically, "well sometimes its just necessary Jane…" he paused for a moment to regain his feeling of control over the room, he continued, "Mr Scott's brother informed us that just prior to the last time William got clean there was an incident and indicated that any relapses in his drug use are usually due to his mental condition relapsing also"

"What happened last time?" Nurse Morton asked….

"What happened last time?... Last time Sherlock was using?" John asked.

Mycroft didn't reply but John could hear him breathing as though he was considering, "John… As I have told you before I worry about my brother constantly I think that should be enough for you to infer the seriousness of his behavior – I am afraid I have to go, the Russians are quite an impatient bunch."

"Wait – Myc – Mycroft… ah fuck it" John mumbled incoherently before hanging up the phone. He was beginning to feel mounting annoyance at the fact that the Holmes brothers (through observation or perhaps background checks on Mycroft's part) probably knew everything there was to know about him and yet he was virtually in the dark about any part of Sherlock's life that he hadn't been witness to. Sherlock's mobile phone was still sitting on the desk beside him where he'd left it. John peered at it, wondering what clues were hidden inside it, if any at all. Maybe he should just scroll through it a bit to see. It's not like Sherlock hasn't done the same thing with his phone right? John picked it up and pressed the 'on' button but unfortunately a lock screen, which he would never be able to crack, quite quickly thwarted his plan. _Damn. _John made a guilty, surprised noise when the phone began to ring as though it had caught him out in the act of snooping.

It was Lestrade. Despite the lock screen he was able to answer the call.

"Hi Greg, it's john"

"Oh John hi… uh I've got a case for you boys, is Sherlock there?"

John considered for a moment, he wasn't sure how much Lestrade knew, "Umm he… is… not" John replied awkwardly.

"Ok, well where is he? When will he be back?"

"He wont be back for a while… I'm not really sure how long… a couple weeks probably… he is…unwell" he was not being very successful at sounding inconspicuous.

"Oh Jesus, don't tell me he's on the drugs again?" Lestrade replied knowingly to John's surprise.

"Yeah uh, he's gone to detox so he should be… ok… I suppose" John stopped suddenly realizing something, "hold on, you don't happen to know what happened last time Sherlock got clean do you? I feel like I'm in the dark"

Lestrade was quiet for a moment, "yeah last time was a big mess unfortunately… actually I'm _really_surprised you could get him to go to rehab voluntarily this time… Uh when I first met Sherlock he was taking private cases and that sort of thing and one of his cases kind of overlapped into becoming a police matter and he somehow pushed his way into continuing to work the case along side me, I wasn't detective inspector yet at this point of course, that case _got _me the promotion to DI… I was just so dumbfounded by his genius, I guess… I wanted to keep working with him but - "

"Right but then you found out he was using drugs"

"Yeah exactly… I confronted him about it - he kept complaining that everything was too boring. He was pushing so hard to solve my cases but I had to ignore him – I said _come back to me when your clean_… he overdosed about two days after that, he was very embarrassed about it I think… I'm still not convinced it was accidental"

John exhaled sadly. He knew that Sherlock was totally able to predict the exact quantity that he could take 'safely' meaning that he either did it on purpose or was so frantic that he missed it – a miss that big was bound to embarrass him still to this day. It amazed him how much the thought of Sherlock being less than superhuman hurt him.

"If you don't want to talk about why you relapsed this time around why don't we go back and talk about the time you overdosed a few years ago – how are you feeling about that incident now?"

Sherlock turned away from the doctor and stared out the window, he could see the hospital across the street and an old man with a clear undiagnosed heart condition walking past it, he should be going _in_, Sherlock thought. He was in a small room with one window, two chairs facing each other and a side table with a box of tissues and a clock between them. The box of tissues irritated him; they were ridiculously preemptive and ingenuous.

"Are you going to talk to me about it?" the doctor asked,

"No shant" Sherlock replied absent minded. He didn't want to talk about it but he could certainly remember it. It was perhaps the single most embarrassing thing he has ever done – the biggest, most pathetic mistake he'd ever made. Maybe Mycroft was right maybe he was stupid because how could he, the great Sherlock Holmes, the god of reason, become so outright irrational. Drugs, the rational response to madness, he reasoned further. _Drugs are rational. _In all theory this was correct, as far as it goes. Besides recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin hadn't always been illegal – they had been perfectly legal in the Victorian era – so realistically it wasn't the drugs fault but rather the fact that they came to be over used by too many very stupid people, he reasoned. And furthermore, his own drug use could be blamed on everyone else for being so boring – he remembered the despair of wondering if anything would ever be able hold his interest for longer than a moment, but drugs, _oh how interesting_, always interesting – the chemical compounds themselves, the purity, the differences in effect according to certain factors, what the effect means in relation to the study of brain function, the neuroscience of drugs, _the effects themselves. _But eventually he began to take them too often and too much, they started to blind him like emotion, like love. The natural opioids that are manufactured in the brain (in the hypothalamus) are from a family of neurochemicals known as neuropeptides – also known as the 'molecules of emotion'. They are the reason you feel what you feel when you're angry or excited or in love. But the molecules that were coursing through his blood were not made in his brain but rather some drug factory in Mexico.

The ventral striatum was also at fault here – the home of motivation, of forward thrust, of desire, the place that causes the theory of 'wanting' and 'liking'. The opiates cause the liking – the sensation of pleasure and the dopamine causes the 'wanting' – the feeling of desire. Therefore he reasoned it makes evolutionary sense that anything that feels good should become the target of desire. Here in one neat package is the fundamental chemistry of _learning _– essentially the reward function of the brain. But on the other hand this leads to repetition compulsion – learning gone bad. The chemistry and neuroscience of drugs was always interesting.

But that wasn't the reason he took them, and he knew it. He took them because the best part of heroin is that it _stops you from caring._

It was the heroin that he overdosed on – not cocaine. And he hated the meaning that his brain constantly extrapolated from that. _How could he be so pathetic as to become addicted to something that mimicked the molecules of emotion?_ Why did he need so much to stop caring if he wasn't supposed to care at all? Not caring is what protected him. He refused to accept the emotions which he had always repressed, the harsh feelings that were threatening the core of his identity, the internal dialogue that spoke of condemnations of his self – for being weak, unlikeable, stupid, wrong…. Alone.

"He seemed so good after he met you John – maybe he _did_ just need a friend" Lestrade finished.

John held the phone to his ear quietly for a while, "this happened right after me and Mary's wedding…" he choked.


End file.
